The
tablet market is growing by leaps and bounds and Apple with its iPad is the
source of much of that growth. There are a number of Android tablets on the
market today, but they aren't selling well and some users are complaining about
the Honeycomb operating system and the availability of tablet-specific apps.

Analysts have agreed that the tablets are taking market share from the notebook
and netbook, but the outlook for tablets overall has taken a downturn recently.
The reason that the estimates for overall shipments by analysts are changing
has to do with the sinking popularity of Android tablets. While Android
offerings are seeing estimates for shipments cut, the iPad is actually being
increased.
Jefferies analyst Peter Misek noted about six months ago that the forecast for
2011 tablet sales was 100 million. After a recent poll of consumers, Misek has
changed his predictions by a whopping 30% reports eWeek. He
believes that 70 million tablets shipped is a more
realistic expectation.

Misek wrote in a research note, "We now believe 70 million to be more
realistic due to: 1) Android 3.0 Honeycomb needing polishing, and 2) Android
tablets that are priced too high."

Misek also thinks that if tablet makers like Motorola and Samsung want to
compete with the iPad, they are going to need to take a hit and cut the price.
Bill Shope from Goldman Sachs also lowered the overall estimates for tablet
shipments in 2011 and 2012. The decline was due to reduced estimates for
Android tablets, the estimates for iPad shipments actually increased.

Shope wrote, "Our iPad forecast remains unchanged, though we have lowered
our non-Apple tablet unit assumptions by 2.3 million units in 2011 and
2012." He continued, "Meanwhile, we have raised our forecast for
Apple's tablet market share to 66.4 percent in 2011 (64 percent prior) and 66.6
percent in 2012 (65 percent prior). Overall, we are expecting 57.7 million
total tablets for 2011 and 78.0 million tablets for 2012, versus 60.1 million
and 80.3 million previously."

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has also said that for Android tablets to be competitive, they need to
be cheaper. NVIDIA has a vested interest in the Android tablet market since his
company makes the Tegra processors that many of the newest Android tablets use.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

In my opinion you are actually in a very good position. Not that car repair is ever fun or cheap, but because of that you will be forced to wait. And anyone who waits to get a tablet of any kind is going to be better off in the long run. The market for these things is still very new. By next year the hardware and features you can expect to get will be much better and for the same cost, if not less.